The present invention relates generally to methods and apparatuses for obtaining information about and/or purchasing pre-recorded music, and more particularly to a method and system for obtaining information about and/or purchasing pre-recorded music while listening to the music at any location.
When listening to music, people often want to identify a song currently being played on an audio system, such as a radio, but can identify neither the title nor the artist. The listener may simply be interested in the artist, title, lyrics, genre, or other information about the music. The listener may also be interested in obtaining a copy of the music, i.e., purchasing the music.
Frequently, the radio station announcer does not state the title, recording artist or other information about the song at the moment when the listener is interested in this information. Even if this information was announced, it may have been announced before the song was played and at that time the listener was not interested or was not then tuned to the station. The listener must then wait until hearing the song again and hope that the title and artist are announced at that time.
Even when information about the song is announced and heard, there are situations in which such information cannot easily be retained, such as when a listener is operating in a noisy environment, such as in an automobile, or when a listener does not have pen and paper at the ready. This situation presents problems to radio listeners and potential music purchasers and sellers alike. Market studies have shown that many radio listeners prefer radio stations that always announce the name of every song and artist.
A significant number of radio listeners seeking to buy music at record stores are often unable to remember the name of a song or the recording artist by the time they enter a music store to purchase the music. In fact, the sheer number of music recordings available for purchase in a music store can be so imposing that many novice music purchasers do not venture into such stores to purchase music, despite wishing to purchase music. Music fans would buy more music if they had immediate information about the title of the song and artist as it is being played, such as on the radio or other location remote from typical retailing locations.
Methods exist for automatically identifying music from a high-quality, relatively lengthy recording. For example, companies that monitor radio broadcasts to determine copyright and publishing royalties and to construct listings of current best-selling or most popular recording i.e., “top charts”, employ certain techniques for identifying copyrighted songs from the broadcast. However, these methods require a high quality piece or excerpt of the song (referred to as a “sample”) and are ineffective on short noisy samples. Usually, these methods require a clear signal that is a direct, high-quality connection to the radio output before it is broadcast to prevent noise from corrupting the sample. Consequently, these methods cannot work in a noisy environment using short samples.
Many times unidentified music is heard when riding in a car (or at another similarly inconvenient location). Moreover, when a listener decides he wishes to know the identity of a particular song being played, it is usually well into the song. Therefore, even if the listener were to begin recording the song at the moment he decides he wishes to know the identity of the song, the sample would be relatively short and possibly noisy depending upon the quality of the audio recording and the recording environment. Certainly, most listeners do not carry high quality recording equipment with them when traveling in a car.
Moreover, even if the listener knows the identity of a song, as time passes the desire to obtain a copy of the song also passes. This is the so-called impulse purchase phenomenon, which is well known to retailers. The impulse purchase phenomenon is particularly strong where the listener has not heard the song before, and thus is unfamiliar with the title and/or recording artist. Unfortunately, there is currently no way for a music seller to take advantage of a potential impulse purchase resulting from a listener hearing a song (for perhaps the first time) in a car or other location that is remote from normal retail locations.
The present invention is therefore also directed to the problem of developing a method and system for both identifying music and/or enabling music retailers to take advantage of impulse purchase phenomena.